Motivational Quotes

Language

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

- Barthes, Roland

Best Quotes about Language

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

Hoban, Russell

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

Orwell, George

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

Paz, Octavio

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

Samuel Johnson

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

George Orwell

Drawing on my fine command of the language, I said nothing.

Benchley, Robert

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

Berger, John

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

Artaud, Antonin

10.

Orwell, George

11.

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Hofstadter, Douglas

12.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

13.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Mathews, Harry

14.

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

White, Elwyn Brooks

15.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

16.

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Saussure, Ferdinand De

17.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

18.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

19.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and no other.

Cioran, E. M.

20.

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Tillich, Paul

21.

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic ape suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.

Jordan, June

22.

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.

Baudrillard, Jean

23.

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.

Charles V

24.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

25.

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Bogan, Louise

26.

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

Rushdie, Salman

27.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

28.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Barthes, Roland

29.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Baudrillard, Jean

30.

For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.

Ingrid Bengis

31.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

32.

I wish life was not so short, he thought. languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.

Tolkien, J. R.

33.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

34.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

35.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

Calvino, Italo

36.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Chomsky, Noam

37.

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

Lewis Thomas

38.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

Whitman, Walt

39.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

40.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

41.

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.

Daumal, Rene

42.

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.

Dworkin, Andrea

43.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

44.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

45.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.